H1 tag confusio

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Don Vermeer: They can, but shouldnt. And dont listen to Neil Patel. 2 tips from me.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Don Vermeer you don`t think "titlegeddon" has changed this answer, where Google is now actively likely to use the H1 *as* the Title, and use the Title for nothing at all?
  
  
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  Don Vermeer: Ammon Haven`t seen that much definitive proof personally. Just it being very random or still using titels. Not much using h1s. Think its too early to say something about titlegeddon haha
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Don Vermeer follow the extensive case studies and work that Lily Ray has done and been sharing on twitter - https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc - Lots of deep dives and extensive study.
  
  TWITTER.COMLily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) | TwitterLily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) | Twitter
  
  
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  Neil Cheesman: I can only speak from personal experience - and that is that many WordPress themes will automatically put the title of a page/post into being an H1.Personally, I have never had any problem with it. IF there were to be any issue with it, I feel there are FAR greater reasons to move up or down the SERPS.
  
  
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  Sherif Mahmoud: Neil Cheesman same here
  
  
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  Domas Tubis: Neil Cheesman don`t you use your brand name on meta titles?
  
  
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  Josh Levenson: They can be. Ultimately this your call. There`s no right or wrong.
  
  
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  Ben Bar: IMO, consider the Title as book Title and H1 as Chapter... They can be the same but it`s not logical.
  
  
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  Linda Caplinger: Ben Bar i consider the site the book and the title as the chapter + branding. The h1 for me is more a regurgitation of the title (but maybe longer or with related terms around same intent) but without the title tag branding.
  
  
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  Ben Bar: Linda Caplinger agree
  
  
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  Daniel Dutton: It doesn`t matter. Little things like this do not have a massive impact on ranking. Don`t waste time overthinking the small things.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Daniel there are cases, especially in the really competitive areas, where it is all the hundreds of tiny factors that things are won or lost. But in general, for the majority of work, absolutely right. Unless you are pushing porn, pills, pharma, or finance, then most of your focus needs to be in impressing people, because not only is traffic made of people, but also links, mentions, and word of mouth all come from people too.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Daniel Dutton CWV to me is the biggest non-event in years, because in the past this was just basic Usability. Speed mattered a helluva lot when most access to the internet was via 9k and 14k modem speeds.
  
  How quickly a page loads enough to interact with usefully and comfortably was always important, right back to the beginning of the web. Basically, anyone actually having to change anything for CWV simply wasn`t following the most basic good practice webmastery anyway.
  
  Not even the first time Google let webmasters know that speed was vitally important. Page Speed update a few years before had already told *everyone* that speed was a metric Google cared about.
  
  
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  Sergio Felix: HTML was created so you could present content that makes sense to your readers.
  
  The book analogy somebody else mentioned, is spot on and also the recommendation about NOT following everything that Neil Patel says.
  
  While H1 and Page Title CAN be the same, to me, that would be poor content (or element) declaration.
  
  This reminds me of the days when you used an exact match domain name, same thing on title, same thing on H1 and several times through the content.
  
  Building websites like that, used to work in the past but I mean c`mon, these are 10 year old "strategies" now.
  
  Just remember to create content for actual readers, then just tag everything in a way that is understandable and easy to navigate.
  
  Spiders and ranking algorhythms will do the rest for you.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Sergio Felix I`ve heard Usability experts make the exact opposite case more than a few times. With tabbed browsers being commonplace, plus mobile being an ever growing part of traffic, the days where a Title would be clearly visible on the title bar are kind of behind us. People often quite reasonably expect the heading to be the title of *that page*, and vice versa.
  
  
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  Juan Dalisay Jr.: Sergio Felix yes equating a website to a book is a good analogy because Bing says that there should only be one h1 tag in a page.
  
  My former assumption was that a website was like a long essay or thesis split into pages and so a page could have multiple h1s
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: It`s six of one, half dozen of the other. The search engines will take what they want from your pages and use it as they see fit.
  
  Put the information on the page you want people to find and appreciate. Don`t follow SEO formulas.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Michael Martinez except yours. They should follow you, subscribe to your site, and follow your formulas, right?
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Why would you take *either* opinion on something you can so simply and easily test yourself for your specific market?
  
  
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  John Carcutt: I work on major News websites with 10’s of millions of visitors a day.
  
  Everyone of our headlines (H1) and Titles tags are Identical and have been for years.
  
  
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  Juan Dalisay Jr.: John Carcutt but maybe it`s because you`re a major website that the identicality of h1 and title doesn`t matter
  
  
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  John Carcutt: Take it how you will, just telling you the facts.
  
  Also, I am speaking about standard Organic search and Google News search. They do have some differences.
  
  
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  Adam J. Humphreys: So Matt Cutts formerly of Google`s said they should be different using a synonym. John Mueller of Google`s said basically the same. My personal experience is I will vary the title to header in some way with query intent information like "What`s the best roof for a house" and "The Best roofing materials for a house" which both clearly answer the intent of a query. Ultimately you want to be the best solution to a problem. Keywords are not as influential as query intent solutions like they used to be. An important factor but dampening with attrition.
  
  
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  Kristine Schachinger: They should not be the same, they can be but they shouldn`t be, and don`t listen to Patel.
  
  
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  Scott Hendison: I`ve pretty much always had the H1 and title closely match. Seldom identical, since the title usually contains the company name too, but they basically match when it feels relevant.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: The people who build search engines and their algorithms tend to be scientists and academics. When they publish academic papers, scientific research, and patents, the H1s and Title tags tend to be extremely similar, and rightly so on a Usability POV.
  
  http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
  
  Guess what their subconscious bias is likely to be.
  
  INFOLAB.STANFORD.EDUThe Anatomy of a Search EngineThe Anatomy of a Search Engine
  
  
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  Vladimir Gertner: Semrush is right this time around
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: The absolute most important thing for anyone wanting a career in SEO to take away from this is noticing that this is NOT a conflict. Both are correct. One statement says that best practice is to have different, and the other statement says that (regardless of best practice) you still *can* have them both the same.
  
  There are a ton of situations any SEO is going to come across where search engine guidelines say one thing, and circumstances say another, and you have to work out whether this is a hard block, or whether it simply means a compromise.
  
  And even beyond that, you will absolutely come across situations where things seem to conflict at first glance, but if you actually think about them, both things can be true at the same time. The people without the brains to work those out are the ones whining that Google is lying to everyone, rather than working out that Google just told them almost exactly the truth of how something works.
  
  
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  Jaroslaw Pidburskyj: The latter everyday forever, it’s continuity